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[ANSWERED] What's going on with some person seemingly called "PirateSoftware" and the stop killing games campaign?
(lemmy.abnormalbeings.space)
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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He's a youtuber who is a known game dev.
And he's pointed out the obvious issue that you can't just demand companies keep servers up and running, if you legally mandate servers can't be turned off then companies would stop releasing online games because that's stupid.
It often costs millions of dollars a year to keep servers up and running. If they are causing the company to lose money, then yeah obviously they're gonna turn em off.
Only naive, entitled gamers would demand such a wild thing. It's not going to get past any courts
Thankyou for giving a perfect example as to why we hate pirate software. Because of his bullshit, this is what you think the Stop Killing Games movement is about.
Maybe try to not get your opinions on such things from narcissistic youtubers.
It skirts around the issue in its wording, but the proposal in actual real life practice is, indeed, effectively demanding this.
The proposal doesn't actually supply any specific solutions to the problem, it's just stomping its feet and throwing a tantrum about the problem, but literally doesn't actually give a real solution.
"Waaah, I don't like it when they do x"
"Okay well, what alternative do you propose?"
"I dunno, I just don't want them to do that cuz I don't like it"
Sorry mate but you have to actually genuinely be able to describe a practical solution to the problem if you wanna make any headway. Otherwise it's just gonna get tossed out as pointless.
Or...
If you indeed try and push something like this through, game devs will just go "okay fuck it, you don't get anything at all then because you demanded something functionally impossible from us, byeeeee" and congrats now you killed your local game dev industry, good job :)
Lol, maybe learn about the movement, dork. This is absolutely not what's being demanded.
I am very aware of it, and I've read the proposal.
It is 100% what is being demanded, the proposal says:
The ONLY way to do this is everything aformentioned. It's indirect in how it's asking for it, but in real life practice the only way the proposal actually gets what it wants, is by either:
A: Demanding (foolishly) that the game devs keep the servers up and running (not happening, get over it)
B: Demanding (even more foolishly) that the game devs release a copy of all the necessary backend technology for self hosting, which you can't demand because it's proprietary and some of it may still be in use, so it's a security and business risk to expose that sort of stuff, so no business will ever be able to feasibly do that.
Sorry but no, it's a foolish demand.
Oh, shut up, loser. That quote does not support your argument on any level.
And your best argument is that server code "may be proprietary"? Fucking pathetic.
You are lying. We all know you're lying. And, you suck at it. Like, you really fucking suck at it.
Go away.
His "game" has been in limbo for what, a decade? And he "worked" at blizzard because of his daddy.
Dude doesn't know shit.
I worked with him both directly and tangentially at Blizzard for a few years, and with his dad for longer. He's the real deal, and has a real level head about the industry.
If you disagree with his point, say that instead of using this type of attack on his person. That's just rude.
I worked with him directly and he's not the real deal. I can make up and just say what I want online too.
[Citation Needed]
Yeah and my uncle works at Nintendo.
Not sure what your uncle has to do with it. Be the change you want to see in the world my dude 😎
That's kind of the biggest problem with this whole ordeal. The people who are talking about it aren't capable of reading the petition, the petition isn't asking for that. Same problem we have with near every controversy.
The EU already mandates minimal service life for things like security updates. I don't see why it won't make it past courts. Hell, under EU laws regarding warranty, games publishers are probably already forced to either run game servers for a minimum of two years (or offer alternatives such as full refunds). This concept is just extending the mandated warranty in a sense. As for the software itself, manufacturers are under tons of regulation when it comes to support and availability of replacement parts in various industries. Entitlement does play a role, but that may very well be in the fact that consumers are simply entitled to access to the goods and services they purchased.
Also, there's nothing stopping companies from releasing alternative servers when their main servers turn off. Games used to come with dedicated servers for free. Companies just decided not to do it anymore because they can make more money with their current strategy. While the games are being sold, these companies make hundreds of millions or even billions of profit. The cost of their servers remaining available is just part of their profit forecast.
None of this will fail because it would be impossible to make happen. The real question is probably if consumers have more power than the video games lobby. I doubt they do. The proposal goes against the financial incentives of video game publishers, so they'll try to convince lawmakers not to bother. If their attempts fail, there's a chance certain games won't make it into the EU if such a law passes, or that certain content won't be available, but it's not like nobody will make games anymore.
A more realistic scenario of a law like this will have game publishers state an expiration date on their software. They already have to when it comes to security updates, but they'll probably have to put a sticker on it like "this game/DLC will stop working after 2026" and let consumers decide whether to buy the product or not.
Aside from the fact it's proprietary stuff they own... you can't just mandate that a company must release stuff they own to the public. They own it, they can do whatever they want with it.
This is the far better parallel to draw imo, and has the best chance of meaning anything.
Except for the fact for most games the online play is an extra feature and not the core game. And thus all game devs have to do is argue that "the game still works in offline play" and this won't apply to those games anyways.
Oh god no, it's way more complicated than that.
Modern game servers for major games are simply just not designed to be run locally bare metal. They're often in the form of complex stacks of multiple moving parts, shit like entire k8s deployment stacks with like 12 distinct resources, many of which might be tightly coupled to implementation details.
Such that even if they release that part public, it still wouldn't work because it depends on other pieces that literally don't exist anymore.
A great example of this is simply any login process.
It's super likely they have an auth server they run that you login to.
They use that auth server for multiple things, not just this 1 game.
They release, say, v2.4 of their game server program in 2025, it's tightly coupled to the auth server v1.7 api.
It works for about 4 months before they update to fix some stuff on their auth server, now their auth server is v1.8 annnnnd...
Now that v2.4 copy of your game server stops working cuz it's not compatible with v1.8 of their auth system, so it's now just dead.
You can't mandate they keep updating their old code on a game they don't support anymore.
So... you're fucked anyways.
You can't mandate they release their auth server cuz it's still in active use and you really don't want to expose the inner workings of the auth system to hackers for them to inspect.
So yeah, it's just not happening, sorry.
Designing a server to be self hosted is a critical choice you make very very early on in development. If it wasn't designed that way from the start, its useless to ask for a copy of it for self hosting, it will stop working eventually when external upstream apis stop being compatible.
They don't need to reslsse stuff they own to the public if they keep the servers running of course. And they can alter their client side software to accept a third party game server and let the fans do the rest. Kind of what the EU has forced Meta to do through the Digital Markers Act.
No, they have to abide by the law. Apple, Google, Meta, and many other billionaire tech companies have already been forced to alter and open up access to their software. Hell, games companies have already been forced to remove lootboxes in "their property".
And the games where this is only a minor feature will be hit the least by the proposed legislation, if at all. Same reason the cybersecurity legislation mandating the availability of software patches doesn't affect devices without network connectivity much. An RC car doesn't need firmware updates, an app-controlled RC car has terrible costs associated with it if you don't build your code right.
I know that. But that doesn't mean someone else can't run the same protocol on bare metal. Just give gamers the ability to hook into someone else's server after shutdown and you'll be fine, probably. Make it part of your sunsetting strategy. Beats waiting for governments to come down and make you alter games you intended to drop in ways you don't want to modify through lawsuits and regulatory pressure.
Plus, you think the people developing the netcode need to provision a full multi continent cloud every time they test their protocol?
Wow, good thing they were mandated by law to release a v1.7 server so v2.4 of their game still works! After all, the servers have been shut down, so v2.4 is the very last version the developer will need to care about. Barring the mandatory support period for the Cyber Resilience Act, of course. Or maybe they could make backwards compatible APIs, though I doubt game developers still know how to these days.
First of all, sure you can. It'd be stupid, but you can.
There it is. Choice. That choice can be influenced. For instance, "you cannot sell your game in the EU" is a good reason to reconsider that choice. Or maybe "figure out what"'ll cost us more, the EU fine or having a few devs release a self-hosted server" for products developed while the law enters into effect.
What upstream APIs? The game has been abandoned. The server code is no longer being worked on. The auth is done server-side on servers they don't even control. There is no upstream to break.
You seem to take the current state of the game development industry and extrapolate from the game publisher's point of view what would be achievable without losing money. That's not how the law works. The law doesn't care. It the law says "no visible blood in your zombie game", you either don't release in Germany or you find a way to comply. Nobody in the government cares about the complexity of remodeling games, all the hard work the colour designers did, the way the shaders were written, it just says "get rid of the blood or fuck off". In this case, the law would say "make your game work or fuck off".
Games worked like this for a decade. They can be made to work like this again. "Modern" doesn't mean "better", it just means "different" when it comes to game servers. The only thing stopping games companies from doing that, is the financial incentive not to. Threaten 'em with a couple billion dollars of fines and they'll realign their incentives. It worked great for social media companies and ad agencies.
Some free-to-play video games would definitely fuck off. The companies willing to put up half a dev's time every month to sync their protocol changes to their self hosted servers will be there to take gamers' money they would've spent on the free to play stuff. There are billions at stake, and games companies are legally obligated to gobble up as many of their billions for their shareholders as they can.
If you mandate that they have to keep the servers running, they just wont bother providing access to the game in your country in the first place, because that would be absolutely insane. Any company would look at that and go "fuck that" and now if you live in that country, you just cant play the game, good job!
Same as above, if you make a law that causes the company to be unable to operate (you have asked something stupid of them) they just won't even provide the game in your country. If the EU passed something like this it would instantly hamstring their entire gaming industry and they'd very very quickly lose a tonne of people who leave to go work in saner places.
Same as above
This all costs money. Enormous amounts of money. If you make it cost too much money to provide the game in your country, they just wont even show up in the first place, so now you don't get to play it at all.
Then they ABSOLUTELY would never even think about providing the game in your country. Do you understand how insane it is to try and force a company to release their propietary STILL LIVE auth backend? Do you understand how huge of a security risk that is? No company would EVER be cool with that.
"Hey do we want to also spin up servers for our game in [country]?"
"If we do, that country has legally mandated if we shut the game down we have to release copies of the game and everything needed to run it to the public, which would include our still live auth servers and etc that our other games depend on"
"Oh, that's insane, no nevermind I guess they don't get to play our game then, lol"
You'd be incredibly naive to think this is a sane ask of any company, no one will do it. Ever.
Pretty ubiquitously the answer will be "don't release it in the EU at all, fuck em" because for most companies doing this would actively have huge downsides on the games performance.
What you need to wrap your head around is the complicated tech stacks that back these online systems aren't chosen for funises, they serve a purpose. These systems allow companies to reduce downtime, improve performance, provide telemetry and real time monitoring, etc etc. They use these for a reason.
If you tell the company "If you wanna be able to release your game in EU, you either have to commit to keeping your servers on, or, you have to fuck up your entire tech stack and ruin your games performance", they'll just go "Guess we won't release in the EU then lol"
Yeah, because they didn't offer the massive multitude of features that people expect of them today.
If you don't want these online features to be so popular, stop buying games that have them
And yet... crazy as it sounds, they still make tonnes and tonnes of money. Almost as if tonnes of other gamers out there like them and pay for them.
Legally mandating companies have to commit suicide to sell in your country isn't going to make them do it. It's just gonna make them stop selling the game in your country.
Correct, and the issue is what is being asked of this movement is so insane to try and comply with that "dont release in [country]" is the better answer
Sorry but that's just the breaks. You'll have to go convince a billion zoomers to stop paying for online microtransaction laden DLCs if you wanna make any actual headway here.
They wouldn't need to release the whole stack to satisfy the requirements. Release the dedicated server executable and patch the game to allow direct connections to servers.
For an MMO it would be more complicated, but the movement also isn't asking to be applied retroactively. Existing MMOs built for scale are free to keep their current architecture. The only requirement would be that future MMOs are designed with an EOL transition plan.
It's an API. Unless they hardcode the IP address it or use certificate pinning, it can just be reimplemented.
Thats literally what I just outlined as what would have to happen.
Oh yeah, just do that, as if that's a super duper easy task to do.
Sorry mate but for most games doing this would mean the game just doesnt even work anymore, because "direct connection" means no concept of an account anymore, and if everything is tied to your account, the whole damn game doesn't work now.
If the game in any way shape or form has any concept of a "login", you are already screwed without any easy solution.
Sure, that's valid, but thats one piece of one example
Now realize that a single game may have several of these APIs it depends on because thats how we build stuff nowadays, so you have potentially multiple things you need to re-implement from scratch. It's possible, sure, but by this point you've effectively remade a very large amount of the game from scratch so who cares now.
Quite often a "Game server" could be dozens of separate pieces, and maybe a couple of those could be released, but even then what if parts of that executable have still in use proprietary pieces that are used in other games they own?
You just can't apply these sorts of rules to software, they arent physical products and they don't work the same way.
It'd be sorta like if discontinued and you demanded they open license the entire car, even though maybe 60% of that car's parts are proprietary things that are also still used in
So if you tried to force them to open license you'd be also demanding they open license parts of
And you can see how that's not gonna be good for them.
The backend server stack hosts a set of tightly intertwined services that conform to an Application Programming Interface. You quite literally do not need to provide the entire stack designed for multi-hundred-thousand concurrent players just to satisfy that interface the game clients are expecting. It costs time and money, but they could damn well just create an implementation designed for simpler, small-scale hosting.
If you designed it for that eventuality, yeah, it's easy to do. Trying to retrofit that into an existing system designed solely to run at cloud scale is a bloody nightmare, and that's not at all what SKG is asking for.
Counterexample: private World of Warcraft servers. They implemented their own, and it's worked fine for them.
The account system is just another API. The client uses it to authenticate, and the dedicated server uses it to verify the client authentication. Fuck, even Minecraft and it's poorly-designed multiplayer can do that. As long as the client and server use the same auth provider, you can still have "accounts" without relying on Mojang's insanely censorship-happy official login system.
I've made this exact same argument you're giving here, and yeah, I know it's not easy. I sympathize with indie developers who are over-designing their server architecture and might not have the resources to do this, but a AAA game studio can afford to hire more developers for their next game instead of C-suite bonuses.
I also made this argument before, and it is valid criticism. It's worth pointing out that the valuable and reusable proprietary parts are the infrastructure and design, not the game logic.
I'm not an entitled twat. I understand that there are legal challenges and big, open-ended questions on how developers could actually pull this off. Making large, consumer-exploitative developers like Epic, Bungie, or Blizzard have to work harder isn't a good enough reason to make me discount an entire consumer-rights movement.
This just goes back to the other issue:
If your country demands the game devs contort and twist their architecture to suit that country's demands, they just wont release it in your country at all.
Sorry but thems the breaks.
You'll have to get way more than the entirety of the EU on board with this to make any change. Youd have to get China and the US on board at the same time
If you target only one of them, that country will decline because it would just argue "you'd fuck up our industry and everyone would leave to [other country] for sales"
And good luck getting the EU, US, and China to all simultaneously agree to this sort of thing, lol.
I mean, hey: it worked to make Apple finally drop their proprietary charging connector. As long as the cost of losing business in the EU is higher than designing an EOL transition for games and hiring developers to actually do it, it's in their best interests.
I hate to break it to you but the EU is not that strong of a market lol
People seriously underestimate the cost of this sort of thing, companies do NOT want to hand out copies of their proprietary software to the public.
The pretty much always have tonnes of important shit baked into it that still gets used in their newer software, so even if its old stuff, it still has bits and bobs in it that matter for their newer stuff they just put out.
But also just, in general, companies are not gonna be chill with people demanding they give them a copy of their backend software. It's just not gonna happen, and the EU is definitely the weaker of the 3 major markets. Companies are just gonna go "lol, now you don't get to play online I guess" instead.
Wrong. Copyright, patent, trademark, etc law is time restricted. Biggest recent example is that evan after decades of (successful) lobbying and corruption, Disney had to release Steamboat Willy into public domain.
Not even remotely comparable.
Code isnt something publicly accessible in the first place. You cant force a company to make a private thing become public, and I mean that in the literal sense of "this wasn't something outside people could even see"
Because, to do so, you'd have to first force the company to keep their internal copy of it archived, which you also can't force them to do.
If a few years later you go "You have to publish this source code now" and the company goes "We don't even have that around anymore, it doesnt exist" wtf are you gonna do about it? It's been deleted, and it was never publicly accessible in the first place, so you have no idea what it even was or looked like.
As a result, you can't force anything about it, it literally doesnt even exist anymore, so you can't travel back in time and make the company undo that.
Of course you can. See documentation of business transactions for tax audits.
Also, it's not like companies lose their code binaries while the game servers are still up and running. And it's not like the code gets thrown out the window as soon as the servers go down or something.
Bro, you are both strawmanning the shit out of this and have no idea on what the fuck you're talking about. You should stop eating corporate propaganda and be happy that there are people trying to work against corporate greed.
Yeah... no.
You can't compare taxes which involve transactions with the outside world, and are arguably the most important thing the government cares about, to the source code of some shitty mobile game that got made 5 years ago or whatever.
If you genuinely tried to make a law in your country that tech companies are legally required to preserve all their source code for games forever, do you know what would actually happen?
Your country's entire game industry would quickly dry up because that's an incredibly stupid thing to try and ask.
Companies aren't gonna sit and audit their developers git history commits for some mobile game or random steam release.
And, if you have any concept of how git or other forms of source control for games works, you'd also know that basic day to day operations would, potentially violate such a law, depending on interpretation.
And no company will wanna incur that risk so they will just avoid your country cuz it's law was written by someone with clearly zero understanding of how source control works.
Classic example of gamers demanding stupid stuff with zero clue about the actual implementation details of what they are asking for.
Which is why the SKG campaign is specifically not demanding that. Pirate Software has misrepresented the stance of the SKG campaign consistently in his videos. Seriously.
I read the proposal.
As a software developer, yes you are 100% asking that, up to the limit of "within feasability"
And guess what, 100% of the time the answer will just be "no, its not feasible, fuck off" by every publisher ever, so its a total waste of time.
There's no feasible/safe/secure way to hand off your entire application stack for people to run locally, you just have to get over it. The publisher isn't going to give you any kind of access to even an old copy of their auth servers, and basically every "phone home" video game ever uses an auth server, so you are already dead on arrival with this sort of requirement.
There's no way to decouple off from the auth server when the entire online functionality is deep rooted in the concept of you having an account to auth with.
I'm a software developer too, funny that.
I have also read the proposal. They ask that if it is not feasible, that publishers put an expiration date on their products, to clarify that the "game purchase" is actually the purchase of a limited-time license that is not guaranteed to continue working. The current practices are deceptive.
So firstly, that's extremely easy to achieve, no more onerous than a decent warranty (or even a disclaimer that there is no warranty and it's mever guaranteed to work), but also, there are third party hosting companies that game publishers could hand off hosting duties to without open-sourcing, creating a final "single player only" patch, or otherwise creating a gentler off-ramp to allow the community to continue to maintain games on their own dime.